Oleg Bartunov has recently announced Postgres' support for jsonb, a binary JSON data type. This should come as great news for Ruby developers, since lots of us choose PostgreSQL as our database of choice. This feature is super new, and it's currently only available on the 9.4 development version of Postgres.

Aslak Hellesoy announced yesterday that version 1.1.6 of Cucumber-JVM has been released. Cucumber JVM is the pure Java implementation of Cucumber, with support for languages that run on the Java Virtual Machine. This new version includes over 40 bugfixes and improvements. The most significant improvements are on the areas of DataTable API, performance, concurrency and Android support. Check out the github repo for a full list of what's changed in the 1.1.6 version of Cucumber JVM.

The folks at TaskRabbit just released Offshore, a gem that allows you to use factories from your central application in another application’s test suite. In addition to that, a normal test suite has factories and/or fixture data and it uses database transactions to reset the data for every test, and Offshore brings this to the SOA world by handling the rollback between tests for you.

Ramesh Jha recently wrote a blog post on how to deploy a Rails application to OpenShift. OpenShift is an open source Platform-As-A-Service solution from RedHat. It's kind of like Heroku, as it allows you to easily manage apps without any hassle, but with OpenShift, you can install it on your server and create your own sort of private cloud.